Framerate stability should be massively improved and you might even see some FPS gains. I went up from 40 to 60 on my place and for the first time since Nirans Viewer i managed to get 100 FPS again in the sky and even up to 180 FPS if I took off my Avatar.

40-60 FPS is already quite good and on par with typical high-end computer game performance, while average FPS in SL is more like 10-20 FPS. So getting anything like 100 FPS would be quite impressive. Caveat SLer and all that -- might be fun giving Black Dragon a whirl and reporting your own FPS in Comments below.

Click here to visit a pretty fun, temporary build in SL: A massive recreation of Homer and Marge's kitchen from The Simpsons. (As you can see above, a can of Homer's beer is about 6 feet tall.) It's created by JanosX, who tells me he's going to leave it in-world until next Monday, so visit soon. "It covers 2 of my parcels," he tells me, "and it's several maximum size meshes, some made in SL and meshed with a mesh generator, some with Blender... it's all optimized meshes to get the lowest land impact possible, [you] can make giant meshes with low land impact if you play good with the physics shape types."

Above, for instance, is what you get when you put "Second Life" into the search box - and indeed, in addition to SL coverage, New World Notes has also featured a lot about Skyrim/Elder Scrolls and much on Minecraft. (Kind of surprised that The Sims didn't pop up, as that franchise has quite a lot of use cases, such as avatar fashion, user-generated art, and roleplay that SL is also popular for.)

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

When it comes to pictures, the word frame gets a workout. After all, the entirety of the picture is the frame in which the artist chose to present the subject. The angle, distance, how it is cropped, all decisions that go into the frame. Then, of course, sometimes the picture itself is put in a frame, and we spend hours at a frame shop dithering over matte colors, bevels, checking dozens of corner samples.

Sometimes, too, the artist creates a frame within the picture, a frame within a frame.

Frames within the frame of the picture create context and and depth. They create different planes within the photo, a foreground or a background, for example. In "High", the photo by Marcus Lynch, above, you can see how frames creates multiple layers. In the front we have the man framed by the dark walls of the structure, the skyscrapers are framed by the opening in the ceiling and the plane is framed by the buildings. This complex layering creates a starkly powerful picture.

The foreground frame is by far the most common. Trees and the blurred leaves and flowers that artfully frame the subject are ubiquitous. This picture above takes what is a bit of tired cliche and freshens it up. The tree frames the subject, but is in turn framed by shadow and water. The foreground frame is about giving context in terms of size and distance. Our eyes want visual clues to where the subject is, and the foreground frame is the easiest clue. It gives us perspective, something pictures need.

She's fun, she's passionate and knowledgable about VR, she's got a great, engaging voice that animates her avatar: Michelle Osorio (@michellekenobi on Twitter, because of course) gives regular group tours of High Fidelity which are then streamed live to High Fidelity's Twitch and YouTube channel. Last I saw, she was showing off some AI-powered fireflies created in HiFi. If you don't have a full VR rig like 99.9% of the population, this is probably the best way to get a glimpse at what's being built in the leading social VR platform.

CastAR, the augmented reality start-up co-created by two former Valve employees, laid off its staff, shut down internal studio Eat Sleep Play and closed its doors today, according to now former employees. Less than 70 people have been laid off between the Palo Alto headquarters and its Salt Lake City studio which was comprised of former Eat Sleep Play and Avalanche Software employees.

It's more accurate to say CastAR was created while at Valve. As co-founded Jeri Ellsworth told me in 2013, Valve CEO Gabe Newell let her keep the IP rights to the technology she had developed at Valve with veteran game developer Rick Johnson :

Watch YouTuber Tyus Haze give a quick test drive of the Black Dragon viewer, a third party viewer I've admired for quite some time. Watch Tyus' video and you'll be able to tell why. "I'm just so amazed at how a viewer in SL can look this good and not do any damage to my computer, and I'm not lagging a bit," he says at one point. "Now if I was trying this on Firestorm, I'd be in all kinds of mess." He promises an in-depth tutorial for installing and configuring BD, so you may want to give him a Subscribe. More NWN coverage of Black Dragon below, including commentary from its creator, NiranV Dean:

Some days I wonder if we are completely screwed. So today’s post is a perhaps slightly hysterical outburst.

The news is not paying enough attention to the Petya/NotPetya ransomware, and the effects it is having on the Ukraine and on a bunch of businesses worldwide. I think it may be a harbinger of how the Internet could kill us all.

Based on what little I have read so far… A piece of widely used tax software — one used by the Ukrainian government — did its usual “phone home” to check for updates. Instead of getting back a few hundred bytes of acknowledgement, it got a viral payload. Basically, this tax software served as a means of auto-updating the virus to thousands of targets. The result is not just accounting systems down, though. It’s gas stations and point of sale systems in grocery stores.

This kind of thing basically makes me wonder how long we’ll have the Internet. Here's why: